In his most famous roles, Peter Boyle played the singing-and-dancing monster in Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein with Gene Wilder, and the perpetually cranky grandfather in TV's Everybody Loves Raymond with Ray Romano and Doris Roberts.

Boyle's father was a cartoonist who hosted Pete's Gang, a local kiddies' show on Philadelphia's Channel 3, where he would draw quick sketches and show them to the camera before cuing up a cartoon or a "Little Rascals" short. Junior Boyle grew up with little interest in performing, and instead became a monk with the Congregation of Christian Brothers, an order affiliated with the Catholic church.

Within a few years, though, it became clear Boyle was too funny for a monastery. Leaving the order, he honed his comedic talents with Chicago's Second City in the late 1960s, where his easygoing attitude was radicalized by the 1968 Democratic National Convention. His first film role, in the powerhouse women's film The Group with Candice Bergen and Joan Hackett, was so small he was not even credited. He first caught critics' attention as the redneck racist Joe in 1970, but all through the era of the Vietnam war Boyle was among Hollywood's most radical leftists.

Alongside Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland, he performed in a series of anti-war rallies held just outside American military bases in Europe and Asia. He married Loraine Alterman, a rock'n'roll reporter and critic who wrote for Rolling Stone, Melody Maker, and The New York Times, and was among the more influential rock writers of her era. Known for her acerbic wit, she once dismissed John Denver's music as "corny sentimentality that just doesn't register on any deep level" and panned Andrew Lloyd Webber's Jesus Christ Superstar as "unmitigated boredom", adding that she "couldn't wait until they nailed Jesus". When Boyle and Alterman were married in a small ceremony at the United Nations chapel, the best man was John Lennon.

His first TV series was Comedy Tonight in 1970, a sketch show that also featured Robert Klein and Madeline Kahn and lasted barely a month. In the 1986 sitcom Joe Bash, he played a semi-crooked cop approaching retirement -- it lasted two months. In a more dramatic vein, he played Gary Cole's father in the radio talk show themed Midnight Caller, and took the Ernest Borgnine role in a TV mini-series of From Here to Eternity. In a popular episode of The X-Files, Boyle played a psychic who predicted that Mulder would die of auto-erotic asphyxiation.

Hosting Saturday Night Live on Valentine's Day in 1976, Boyle sang "My Funny Valentine" to his then-girlfriend Alterman -- while she, for comic effect, made out with another man in the audience. In a memorable skit later that night, Boyle and John Belushi played "Dueling Brandos", trading lines from Marlon Brando films.

Boyle suffered a mild stroke in 1990, and had a heart attack on the set of Everyone Loves Raymond in 1999. He was back at work within a few weeks.